[Grok-dev] Re: The Grok Learning Curve

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Sebastian,

Thank you for your thoughts. We do want to get the learning curve down, 
and I agree we aren't where we need to be yet. But at least we're on the 
right track.

Sebastian Ware wrote:
[snip]
> -I also believe (contrary to a comment in a post on this mailing list) 
> that it is quite useful to use recipes that "just work" eventhough one 
> at the time doesn't understand how (that's how most people learn to talk 
> and read -- learn by example)

Perhaps this refers to the automatic test setup discussion I had with 
Tres. :) Just to make it clear: I agree there is a lot of benefit to 
having sample code out there, and even more to recipes that describe to 
people how to set things up. I even agree that grokproject could be 
doing basic test setup. It's just that I don't like Zope's current test 
setup story very much.

[snip]
> So, I would suggest focusing/furthering the efforts along these four paths:
> 
> 1 -- Refine the class/object browser

I agree that this is extremely important, especially once we all start 
using it I think we'll see a lot of movement on this. We shouldn't be 
afraid to think big here, as long as we stay on focus: "help developers 
develop" (as opposed to, provide a development environment, or provide a 
user interface for content managers, etc).

[snip]
> Everybody can write a recipe, I mean a recipe showing how to register 
> and use a utility is really useful to a newbie. A recipe showing how to 
> create and extend users... lots of stuff. This stuff can be found in 
> Philipps book, but as a newbie, it isn't a piece of cake to understand 
> the Zope 3 stuff and then Grok it.
> 
> If everybody took upon themselves to write at least three recipes, we 
> would be getting somewhere and getting there fast :) 

What's extremely important when people write recipes is that:

* people actually *recognize* that someone's message to the mailing list 
could be turned into a recipe and *say* so when it happens.

* when people *do* post recipes to the mailing list, we have a follow 
up. i.e. the recipe doesn't just sit there without any replies, but 
people take it, restructured text it, check it in, and get it online.

I've been trying to make sure this happens, and when prompted, people 
help very well with restructured-textifying it and putting it online. 
But I got a bit worried a while ago when I caught up with the mailing 
list and noticed there were two great recipes sitting on the mailing 
list and nobody bothered to take up the authors on it.

So I replied to it, and we're fine - the authors kept up with it and 
luckily didn't go away. But this is a good way to lose recipes and to 
curb enthusiasm, so we shouldn't let this happen again!

> and please... how 
> to I get into some serious debugging...? :)

I'm trying to understand what problems you have with debugging first. I 
don't use post-modern debugging myself so I can't help you there, but I 
just put in a 'import pdb; pdb.set_trace()' in places and start debugging.

Regards,

Martijn